The RHIC design overview

The salient performance objectives for the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) are presented and the rationale for the design choices of the major collider systems is conveyed. RHIC provides collisions of heavy ions covering the entire mass range from protons to gold. For the prototypical case of Au-on-Au, one obtains energies up to 100 GeV/n per beam and luminosities of ∼2×1026 cm−2 s−1, averaged over a 10-h storage time. Operation with polarized protons is also possible. The overall accelerator complex used for gold ions consists of the Tandem Van de Graaff, the Booster, the AGS, and the Collider itself, and the scenario for the beam transfer between machines is described. The two separate collider rings cross at six interaction points, where the lattice design provides low-beta insertions for maximum luminosity. The interaction diamond length of <20 cm rms is achieved by bunched beam operation and holding the 56 bunches in a 197 MHz radio-frequency (RF) system after their acceleration in a 28 MHz RF system. The rings are constructed with superconducting magnets, which have a cold bore aperture of 6.9 cm in the arcs. The RHIC specific design challenges posed by intrabeam scattering of heavy ions, passage through transition energy with slow-ramping superconducting magnets, and control of magnetic errors in the low-beta triplet quadrupoles are addressed.